Theoretical vs Practical Knowledge

Thu Dec 13 05:22:23 PST 2001

> I have a boss now who is infamous to the people to came after
> him for "describe all the options to ls." It's an icebreaker.
> When a "sr system admin" manages to list 4 and stop then you
> know s/he's faking it.  The sr. people know that it's pretty
> large.

When I was at Synopsys, we used a similar approach, albeit we tended to
tag-team people.  We'd start with something along the lines of "Tell me
how ls works." and have the candidate explain something about inodes,
where they're stored, what they contain, what the superblock is, why and
where there are multiple copies, etc.  Basic filesystem stuff.  When
they got to a point they didn't know any more, we'd tell them that part
of the answer (e.g. what's in the indodes) and move on to another line
of questioning.  A few interviews later, another interviewer would go
with "Tell me how ls works" and see if they could remember whatever it
was the first one told them.  It was a good way to test the ability to
learn and remember something under pressure, among other things.

Rich